A Book About Network Television in the late 1940s and early 1950s, by Andrew Lee Fielding. Published in 2007 by BearManor Media. See also: www.luckystrikepapers.com

Sunday, July 12, 2015

Singer Artie Malvin

In April, I wrote about the passing of Ray Charles--often
called the "other" Ray Charles.He was a prominent vocal arranger, composer, singer and leader of the
vocal/choral group The Ray Charles Singers.

After Mr. Charles died, I had an e-mail exchange with Jan
Malvin.Her mother, Irene Malvin, and
her late father, the singer Artie Malvin, were close friends with Ray Charles
and Charles's late wife Bernice.

In a more recent exchange, I asked Jan Malvin if she could send me a photograph or two of her father and Ray Charles.She sent the picture below, which is from the 1980s or early 1990s.

(Artie Malvin, left, and Ray Charles)

Artie Malvin worked with Ray Charles for years--in recording
sessions, and as one of the
"Hit Paraders," the vocal/choral group on the 1950s television show Your HitParade.The Hit Paraders--like
Charles's own Ray Charles Singers--were hired by Charles, were overseen by him,
and he wrote all of the group's arrangements.

The Hit Paraders were a key part of the TV program--and not only
vocally.In addition to singing on the
show--both on-camera, and off-camera--members of the Hit Paraders routinely
acted in the show's musical production numbers (as did the show's dancers).

Mr. Malvin joined the cast of the Hit Parade in 1950, the year the television program went on the
air.He remained with the show for
much of the 1950s. My mother, Sue Bennett, knew him well, from her time on the Hit Parade (1951-1952), and spoke of him with great
fondness.

Mr. Malvin was one of the best known
of the TV show's Hit Paraders--having been a vocalist, in the early 1940s, with
Claude Thornhill's orchestra, and later (as Cpl. Artie Malvin), singing with
Glenn Miller's Army Air Force Band.

Here is one of the songs Mr. Malvin sang with Glenn Miller. It's
a wonderful recording, and is from the CD Glenn
Miller and theArmy Air Force Band
(Laserlight Digital).The song, by Frank
Loesser, is "What Do You Do in the Infantry."The vocal group singing with Mr. Malvin--a
group he organized, and sang with--is The Crew Chiefs.

Beginning in the later 1950s, Malvin's oversaw his own
vocal/choral group, and it was featured on various television programs. As noted in the
Tim Brooks and Earl Marsh television encyclopedia, The Complete Directoryto
Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present (Ballantine Books), "The
Artie Malvin Singers" were featured on The
Julius La Rosa Show (1957, NBC), on Steve
Allen Presents The Steve Lawrence-Eydie Gorme Show (NBC, 1958), and (as
"The Artie Malvin Chorus") on The
Pat Boone-Chevy Showroom (1958-1960). In the early 1980s, Mr. Malvin's singers were
featured on CBS's The Tim Conway Show.

In 1957, bandleaderJimmy Dorsey's record, "So Rare"--featuring
Mr. Malvin's singers--was released.It was
a big hit, reaching #2 on the music charts; this was a couple of months before
Mr. Dorsey's death.

The recording, Wikipedia notes, "became the highest
charting song by a big band during the first decade of the rock and roll
era."

During the 1950s, Mr.
Malvin was known for his cover recordings of hits by Elvis Presley, Bill Haley,
and others. In the 1950s, too, he appeared often on children's records, and through the years sang on many national
television and radio commercials.

In the 1970s, he won two Emmy Awards (and was nominated for
another), for special musical material he wrote for The Carol Burnett Show; he worked on the show from 1967 until 1978, the entire time the program aired. He
also received an Emmy nomination for musical material he wrote for a 1967 Frank
Sinatra TV special, which also starred Ella Fitzgerald and Antonio Carlos Jobim.

In 1980, he was nominated for a Tony Award, for music and
lyrics he contributed to the well-known Broadway revue Sugar Babies, which had made its debut in 1979, and which ran until 1982.

I would have loved to have had the chance to talk with Mr. Malvin.
In 2005, while rewriting my book about
early television--a book I had originally completed in the 1980s, but which did
not reach publication at the time--I tried to interview him.He was not well, however, and was therefore unable
to speak with me. He passed away in
2006, at age 83.

(Photograph of Artie Malvin and Ray Charles, courtesy of Jan Malvin; still image of Artie Malvin taken from film of Tex Beneke and The Glenn Miller Orchestra, via YouTube)

A Blog About Early Television...Later Television...The Big Band period...and Other Matters...

"The Lucky Strike Papers"--subtitled "Journeys Through My Mother's Television Past"--profiles such early network television shows as "Your Hit Parade" (also known as "The Lucky Strike Hit Parade"), "Kay Kyser's College of Musical Knowledge," and "The Freddy Martin Show." Author Andrew Fielding's late mother, Sue Bennett, sang on these programs, and others, in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

About Me

Andrew Fielding has written for The Boston Globe, The Boston Herald, The Providence Journal, The Philadelphia Daily News, Horizon Magazine, and other publications. He has also worked as a radio talk show host--in Philadelphia, in suburban Philadelphia, in Charlottesville, Virginia, and in northern New Jersey. Most recently, he was, for three years, the host of a weekly talk show on a nostalgia-oriented Internet radio station. His book about early television, "The Lucky Strike Papers," was published in December, 2007 by BearManor Media. A revised edition of the book is forthcoming.